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Thursday, August 27, 2009

T-Shirt Bag Tutorial

I saw the instructions for this on Martha Stewart. Click here for her directions. The directions given there will suffice, but I thought I'd try and give something back to the wonderful world of blogging craft tutorials by taking some step-by-step pictures of how I made some of these bags myself. I tried making a bunch this morning to give as a wedding gift for my friend who got married today. I think they turned out nicely. Enjoy the tutorial!

Scrounge up some old t-shirts. Size small works best, otherwise the bags just end up being huge. I didn't have any t-shirts laying around that I wanted to get rid of, so I went to DI and got all of these for $1 each. I was going for fun t-shirts in a variety of colors.

Start by turning your t-shirt inside out. Next, I recommend pinning the bottom hem together. I was going to just wing it and I was glad that I had pinned it once I started sewing. Sometimes used t-shirt hems like to pull and curl kind of funny, but I had no problems with them pinned together. Another reason I recommend pinning the hems together before you sew is that almost all of the t-shirts I used were slightly longer in the back (probably from people pulling their t-shirt down) and so it looked a lot nicer matching them up ahead of time.

I love this picture of all the colorful shirts. They're all pinned, just waiting to be sewn together at the bottom.

Now that you've turned your t-shirt inside out and pinned the bottom hem together, sew a straight line along that bottom hem.

I just lined up my presser foot with the surging on the bottom hem of the t-shirt. So easy. After you do this, turn your t-shirt right side out.

Next, use a medium size bowl to mark a larger opening. (You'll line the bowl up over the neck hole.) Martha Stewart richy-pants says to use a washable fabric pen. That's completely unnecessary. I didn't have one on hand (and probably wouldn't have used one if I did). I just grabbed a permanent marker and traced around the bowl. Then, when I cut the hole out I cut just outside the line so the permanent marker would be cut off with the neck hole. On the t-shirts that had fun prints higher up on the front or back I just moved the bowl and marked it accordingly. As if anyone will ever notice that some of your bags have a slightly different size opening.

See?

After you cut out the neck hole, cut off the sleeves along the arm holes. Now you have handles. Your bag is finished! Ta-da!

Close-up of another finished bag

Close(er)-up
(I love the picture on this shirt.)

The pile of finished bags. Perhaps I got a little carried away, but I loved how they all looked together and I couldn't bear to break up those wonderful colors!

Since this was a gift, I wanted them to look nicer than just a pile of old cut-up t-shirts, so I rolled up each one with the coolest part showing and tied it with a ribbon.

Pile o' t-shirt bags

All the t-shirt bags ready to go in the gift bag (a little ironic to put them in a paper bag, I know, but I had to wrap them up nice enough to take to a wedding reception).

I had a blast working on this project. It was SO fast and easy. It would be a great first sewing projects for kids to start learning how to sew on a machine and cut out fabric. Also a great idea for enrichment or young women's activities.

Good luck making your own t-shirt bags!

P.S. I think I'm going to make bean bags out of the left over sleeves. :)